


Reinvent and Believe

by chaoticallyclev



Category: Inception
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-20
Updated: 2010-10-20
Packaged: 2017-10-24 12:27:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/263459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaoticallyclev/pseuds/chaoticallyclev
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is two days’ worth of stubble scattered across his jaw, dark tics on a white slate marking every moment since—well, <i>since.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Reinvent and Believe

  
**Reinvent and Believe**  
:::

  
There is two days’ worth of stubble scattered across his jaw, dark tics on a white slate marking every moment since—well, _since._

Technically, specifically—and it’s important to be specific in these things-- it’s been 45 hours and 26, no, 27 minutes. Not quite two days, but every moment has been felt and digested.

Every moment Since.

(If capitals are given then it is titled and therefore named just enough to remain _un_ named and he doesn’t have to think about everything that Since entails.)

His mind has been spinning endlessly in every moment Since.

It’s just an endless blur of grey white red and cold—

Since—

Blares in the background and the fuzz of silence as his brain shut down and could only think that, from now on, everything will be thought of as moments after Since. Like: After Mal. Now, there’s After Since.

But he doesn’t want to think of it like that, never never never wants to reside long enough in After Since that it becomes a full timeline. Endless shadows on his cheeks are enough as it is.

Why keep marking the time after Since?

Shouldn’t time have stopped by now?

But it hasn’t. So he resides in After Since and thinks senseless things that rattle around and around in his head.

— Grey white red and cold. Distant blares.

He can feel someone reaching for him now, tugging on his sleeves urging him up and away, but there is nowhere away from Since.

He’s just sitting on this floor— tile? It’s sticky underneath him, patterned in a way he doesn’t care to register.

He’s been here for two days After Since, but this isn’t where Since occurred. They wouldn’t let him stay there, those same hands, they urged him away, away, but it’s still After Since and that’s how he knows—there is nothing after Since.

This is Limbo.

His totem says otherwise, but this is Limbo.

What else could it be?  
What else is so fuzzy in absolute certainty? What else could be so trapping, could cage him in every thought? Where else could this—Since—occur, and hands still have the audacity to move him, to try and comfort him, for Hands to murmur reassurance in his ears like anything at all matters after Since.

Reality would know better.

No—this has to be limbo.

This has to be a dream.

He just needs to wake up.

Wake up wake up wake up – where there is no more since and no red on concrete, where the reassurances wouldn’t come from Hands, they’d come from—

But they can’t because this is After Since and no more will there be reassurances whispered in that voice, that—no.

No.

There will be.

This is Limbo.

This is a dream.

All he has to do is wake up--

Wake up--

Wake up--

Wake up--


End file.
